Gaudy Night Final

I started to blog about Gaudy Night some time ago but lost track of it. The action of the novel is largely set in Oxford, where Harriet Vane goes to her old college to investigate an outbreak of poison pen letters. She collects some information and meets a young student several years her junior, who starts to pay court to her. She writes to Peter and tells him she is doing a private investigation.. and he seems interested but he has to go abroad. She wonders what he is up to but begins to be increasingly worried about the incidents at the college. She keeps trying to urge the dons to let her hire a professional detective, but they refuse. Then one of the more nervous students tries to commit suicide and she persuades them to let her call in Peter.. who is back from his trip abroad. He comes to see her and reads her documentation of the goings on at college. They get on much better than they had done before and she is surprised to find that he does odd jobs for the Foreign office, and realises that she had never cared enough to take any interest in what he did when he was not detecting. Peter is concerned about her safety and suggests that when she is patrolling the college at night, she wears a protective collar.